Open AccessReview Impact of an in-built monitoring system on family planning performance in rural Bangladesh Humayun Kabir*, Rukhsana Gazi, Ali Ashraf and Nirod Chandra Saha Address: He
Trang 1Open Access
Review
Impact of an in-built monitoring system on family planning
performance in rural Bangladesh
Humayun Kabir*, Rukhsana Gazi, Ali Ashraf and Nirod Chandra Saha
Address: Health Systems and Infectious Diseases Division, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh Email: Humayun Kabir* - humayun@icddrb.org; Rukhsana Gazi - rukhsana@icddrb.org; Ali Ashraf - nashraf@icddrb.org;
Nirod Chandra Saha - nirod1@loycos.com
* Corresponding author
Abstract
Background: During 1982–1992, the Maternal and Child Health Family Planning (MCH-FP)
Extension Project (Rural) of International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh
(ICDDR,B), in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) of the
Government of Bangladesh (GoB), implemented a series of interventions in Sirajganj Sadar
sub-district of Sirajganj sub-district These interventions were aimed at improving the planning mechanisms
and for reviewing the problem-solving processes to build an effective monitoring system of the
interventions at the local level of the overall system of the MOHFW, GoB
Methods: The interventions included development and testing of innovative solutions in
service-delivery, provision of door-step injectables, and strengthening of the management information
system (MIS) The impact of an in-built monitoring system on the overall performance was assessed
during the period from June 1995 to December 1996, after the withdrawal of the interventions in
1992
Results: The results of the assessment showed that Family Welfare Assistants (FWAs) increased
household-visits within the last two months, and there was a higher use of service-delivery points
even after the withdrawal of the interventions The results of the cluster surveys, conducted in
1996, showed that the selected indicators of health and family-planning services were higher than
those reported by the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 1996–1997 During
June 1995-December, 1996, the contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) increased by 13 percentage
points (i.e from 40% to 53%) Compared to the national CPR (49%), this increase was statistically
significant (p < 0.05)
Conclusion: The in-built monitoring systems, including effective MIS, accompanied by rapid
assessments and review of performance by the programme managers, have potentials to improve
family planning performance in low-performing areas
Background
Inadequate basic management skill among health teams
at the implementation level is one of the main constraints
in providing primary healthcare (PHC) in developing countries [1] Literature on health reforms also empha-sizes strengthening the capacity of the ministry of health
Published: 7 June 2007
Human Resources for Health 2007, 5:16 doi:10.1186/1478-4491-5-16
Received: 9 January 2007 Accepted: 7 June 2007 This article is available from: http://www.human-resources-health.com/content/5/1/16
© 2007 Kabir et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Trang 2at the central and district levels and improvement of
supervision and administrative leadership [2-7] An
effec-tive monitoring and tracking mechanism enables
identifi-cation of low-reach catchments areas, operational
problems in improving coverage, and corrective actions to
enhance service-use [8] In the Philippines, focus is placed
on improving maternal and child health and meeting the
reproductive intentions of women by improving the
national management information system (MIS), making
better use of existing data from various sources to produce
an annual status report for the family-planning
pro-gramme, and strengthening the monitoring systems at the
local level [9] There is a need to increase efficiency,
decen-tralize the decision making process, and train health staff
in the areas of management, policy, and planning [10] to
implement a minimum package of cost-effective
public-health measures and clinical interventions aiming at
improving health conditions in low-income countries
Pathfinder International, a Rural Service Delivery
Partner-ship (RSDP), was a part of the National Integrated
Popu-lation and Health Programme (NIPHP) of the MoHFW,
GoB The RSDP collaborated with the University of North
Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, United States of America
(USA), to introduce a local-level monitoring system
through an action-plan intervention for strengthening
team work and developing the competence of health and
family-planning managers and frontline supervisors at the
levels of sub-district and below The RSDP complemented
the government efforts to increase the accessibility and
use of the MCH-FP programme by rural families in the
context of the NIPHP [11] The action-plan intervention
revealed that both number of acceptors of contraceptive
methods and use of child immunization services
increased, and evidence of MCH-FP performance-related
meetings held at the sub-district and union levels was
more systematic during the implementation of action
plans [12] The MoHFW considered the participation of
stakeholders and users of health services in all phases of
project cycle, (i.e planning, implementation, monitoring,
and evaluation) a vital element for achieving the goal of
the Health and Population Sector Programme (HPSP)
The MoHFW introduced a stakeholders committee in
1999 to develop local plans for comprehensive health and
family-planning services Systematic holding of meetings
of the stakeholders committee carried positive effects in
improving the delivery of health and family-planning
services, while the meetings also ensured the monitoring
of performance of local health facilities [13]
In Bangladesh, the delivery of health and family planning
services for 300 000 rural populations is coordinated from
the sub-district (upazila), the lowest administrative
struc-ture with substantial responsibilities for planning and
implementation of all development activities in rural
areas [14] The Directorate of Family Planning (DFP) administers doorstep delivery of the family planning pro-gramme, particularly in rural areas, by its female grass-roots workers, known as Family Welfare Assistants (FWAs) The FWA visits the home of each married woman
of reproductive age (MWRA) once every two months to provide information and counselling on family planning, distribute oral pills and condoms, disseminate informa-tion about the services available at the various service cen-tres, and refer clients to service centres The MIS Unit of the DFP was established in 1979 to meet the information needs of both family planning and maternal and child health [15] Rajshahi division has experienced the highest contraceptive use-rate in the country since 1983, followed
by Khulna division [16] However, Sirajganj was a low-performing sub-district located in the highest low-performing division In 1983, the CPR in Sirajganj was only 8%, while the national CPR for rural areas was about 19% There was
a sharp decline in the total fertility rate (TFR) at Sirajganj from 6.4 in 1983–1985 to about 3.8 in 1990–1992 The CPR stabilized at about 40% during 1990–1995 The desired family size in Sirajganj was over 3.0 in 1993 and has declined slightly since then [17] Lack of population based information has traditionally been one of the key drawbacks to formulating timely, responsive health poli-cies in much of the developing world In usual situation, the administrator or policy-maker requests data from an information or evaluation unit, which, in turn, presents either an analysis of existing data or conducts a field sur-vey [18]
The MCH-FP Extension Project (Rural), in collaboration with the MoHFW introduced a local-level monitoring sys-tem during 1982–1992 in Sirajganj for improving the management capability where the programme managers had reviewed the progress of the performance of service providers on a few selected indicators from monthly serv-ice statistics using the MIS in various meetings The FWA Register was designed as a longitudinal record keeping system for the FWA Under the leadership of MIS Unit of the DFP, it provided a foundation for the monitoring of FWA activities through supervisory field-visits [19] Fort-nightly meetings, mid-level supervisory meetings, and sal-ary-day meetings were held once a month among local-level managers, service providers, and supervisors to review the performance of the programme and to identify the problems and barriers Development of a strategy plan
to address those barriers was a component of the monitor-ing system This provided a venue for review of perform-ance, identification, and solution of problems This study was designed to assess the overall performance despite the operational changes that have since occurred Since Siraj-ganj was a low-performing area in terms of indicators on health and family-planning, the present study was intended to evaluate whether an in-built monitoring
Trang 3sys-tem and local level planning would improve the
perform-ance
Materials and methods
The study was conducted to assess the impact of an
in-built monitoring system on the sustainability of a few
selected indicators of MCH-FP after the withdrawal of the
interventions
A cross-sectional study design was followed Both
quanti-tative and qualiquanti-tative methods were used for collecting
data on selected indicators A rapid survey methodology
was developed to provide administrators with quick
infor-mation on problems faced at the community level The
cluster sampling procedure has been used throughout the
world in immunization surveys The EPI (Expanded
Pro-gramme on Immunization) 30-cluster rapid assessment
survey was used as the quantitative method for collecting
data on selected indicators Multi-stage, simple random
sampling was used – one in July 1995 and the other one
in December 1996 – in order to minimize the sample size
required A list of villages of all unions (one sub-district
consist 8–10 unions having average population of 25
000–30 000) was used as a sampling frame Twenty
vil-lages were selected, covering all the unions of the
sub-dis-trict Selection of the number of villages from each union
was proportional to the size of the union A cluster of 30
MWRA from each village was selected that yielded a
sam-ple of 600 MWRA for interview Female interviewers
received seven days' intensive training on data collection
using various research methods and techniques They
interviewed 600 MWRA under the supervision of a field
research officer who had more than seven years'
experi-ence in field research work and had supervisory and
mon-itoring skills The interviewer asked the responsible
person of the sample village to select a primary school or
mosque/temple/church/pagoda (a place of worship) One
household from one specific corner of the worship place
or primary school was selected as an index household
The corner was specified beforehand and was constant for
all the selected villages Interviews of neighbouring
per-manent residence MWRA, following the one in the index
household, continued until interviews of 30 such MWRA
were completed Female respondents were selected
because they were the major recipients of reproductive
healthcare services The major indicators of health and
family-planning were: (a) awareness about services
avail-able from FWAs; (b) frequency of contacts with FWAs; (c)
number of desired children; (d) unmet contraceptive
need; (e) accessibility to H&FWCs and SCs; and (f) use of
contraceptive methods Design effect was used for
estab-lishing that 210 children (i.e 30 clusters with 7 children
per cluster) are necessary for a survey In this study, the
required sample was doubled to avoid the design effect
The qualitative methods were used for assessing the rou-tine activities of 66 FWAs The rourou-tine activities observed included: (a) administration of injectables at the door-step and (b) record-keeping Two research officers made three days' observations on the activities of each FWA in a year during their home- visits A structured observation checklist was used At the facility level, three categories of meetings were observed, namely:
(i) fortnightly meetings of FWAs and their immediate supervisor and paramedics at H&FWC to review the performance of the previous month and current stock
of contraceptives;
(ii) monthly mid-level supervisory meetings and local managers to review the union-wise monthly perform-ance, discuss the field problems, and made decision to solve those problems; and
(iii) monthly salary-day meetings of field and union-level service providers, supervisors, and local manag-ers to review the MCH-FP-related performance of field workers and paramedics A structured observation checklist was used for collecting information on 34 meeting proceedings Content analysis of meeting minutes was done, and reports from observers of meetings were analyzed manually
Univariate analysis was conducted using SPSS (version 10) to determine different indicators of health and family-planning use Chi-square test was employed to observe any significant differences in proportions between the first cluster survey (referent) and the second cluster sur-vey
Limitation
In absence of division-wise selected indicators, we used the national survey data of BDHS 1996–1997 to compare the selected indicators of health and family planning serv-ice use with the cluster survey or rapid assessment survey
Results
Observation of routine activities of FWAs
Data of 1995 and 1996 showed a consistent pattern of adherence to the recommended protocol for administra-tion of injectables (Table 1) The skills of the FWAs remained very high (99%), and the FWAs followed the procedures necessary for the maintenance of correct-recording in the FWA Register However, the FWAs did not strictly follow the checklists for screening the pill and injectable contraceptive users
Performance review through meetings
All the 3 categories of meetings – salary day, mid-level supervisory, and H&FWC meetings were – monitored
Trang 4through an observation checklist Thirty-four meetings in
1995 and 36 meetings in 1996 were observed All types of
meetings were regularly held, although in some cases
there was a delay of one-and-a-half hours or two hours in
starting the meetings Each meeting continued for about
2–3 hours in general, and attendance was satisfactory
(90–95%) Other than salary day meetings, formalities in
terms of the recording of the agenda and post-discussion
resolutions of issues after discussion were maintained in
the majority of the meetings The monthly performance of
maternal child health and family planning indicators
were reviewed in the majority (70%) of the meetings
Client surveys
Table 2 shows a 13% increase in the CPR in Sirajganj
(from 40% in 1995 to 53% at the end of 1996) over a
18-month period (odds ratio ([OR] = 0.59; 95% confidence
interval [CI] 0.47–0.73) The difference was significant (p
< 0.05) Fecund women, who were neither pregnant nor
amenorrheic and who were not using any
family-plan-ning method, expressed their desire to wait for two or
more years to be pregnant again, which may be
consid-ered an unmet need for family planning The unmet
con-traceptive need declined from 30% in 1995 to 21% in
1996 (OR = 1.6; CI 1.25–2.06) However, desire for no
additional children remained the same in 1995 and 1996
(OR = 1.0; CI 0.80–1.24) There was an indication of
greater accessibility to contraceptive services, which was
reflected in more frequent contacts between the FWAs and
their clients within the last two months (OR = 0.79; CI
0.63–0.98) and a higher use of SCs and H&FWCs in 1996
than in 1995 The use of SCs and H&FWCs increased,
respectively, from 14% to 29% and 34% to 42% during
the period from June 1995 to December 1996 in Sirajganj
(OR = 0.40; CI 0.30–0.53) The differences were
statisti-cally significant (p < 0.05) The results of the cluster
sur-veys conducted in 1996 showed that the selected
indicators of the use of health and family-planning
serv-ices were higher than those reported by the BDHS 1996–
1997, except the unmet contraceptive need (Table 3) The
increase in the CPR was attributable to all methods, except
for vasectomy, from 1995 to 1996 (Figure 1) The most
noticeable changes were observed in the use of pills and
injectables
Discussion
The remarkable improvement in programme performance
as reported in the present study is attributable to two major factors: first, a series of on-the-job-training activi-ties were conducted on the record keeping system, screen-ing checklists of family plannscreen-ing methods, administerscreen-ing injectable contraceptive, management of side-effects of contraceptive methods, supervision and monitoring, etc, that updated the existing knowledge and facilitated close interaction between the trainers and the trainees Mainte-nance of the active learning process, use of feedback mechanisms, and job related hands-on training were instrumental The FWAs almost universally maintained the recommended protocol for administering injectables even after the withdrawal of the interventions The high coverage of routine activities of the FWAs, such as record-keeping and screening of contraceptive methods, was also sustained after the withdrawal of the interventions Second, conducting regular performance review meetings was very powerful The feedback system in those meetings was ensured to evolve close interaction between field workers and supervisors The local manager had the opportunity to identify any problems and explore appro-priate solutions This led to efficient management of the programme and advance planning In the meetings, high-performing workers were praised, and poor-high-performing workers were offered assistance This process was found to
be useful for monitoring individual performance and aggregated outputs at the union levels, which finally cre-ated positive attitude and improved motivation for the entire team Thus, overall improvement of the programme performance took place Another influential factor was the independent local survey, which was indicator-based and that ultimately motivated the programme managers
to fix the target, organize field activities, and generally improve The FWAs who provided services at the door step motivated their clients to avail of better-quality services at the fixed site centres The higher use of SC and H&FWC services was an indicator of improved field activities The in-built review system was crucial The district and local managers reviewed the results of the rapid assess-ment survey These reviews assisted the sub-district
man-Table 1: Observation of routine activities of Family Welfare Assistants (FWAs)
(n = 66)
1996 (n = 66)
%correct % correct
Proportion of FWA who followed the recommended protocol during administering injectable contraceptive 98 99
Trang 5agers and front-line supervisors in identifying the
weakness of the programme and develop field operational
strategies The local managers then instructed the
front-line supervisors to strengthen their monitoring and
super-vision activities (to improve the work of field-level
work-ers), which were reflected in the survey results This was an
effect of the managers' motivation and positive efforts
towards the improvement of the programme
In a review paper on performance monitoring for family
planning, experiences of different countries have been
highlighted [9] Indonesia has been one of the most
suc-cessful developing countries to meet its demographic
objectives It has a strong management-oriented data
sys-tem, which was created and maintained using a
bottom-up approach Findings of a case study in the Philippines
revealed that the better use of existing data from various sources produced an annual status report for the Philip-pine Family Planning Programme (PFPP) and strength-ened the monitoring systems at the local level Such a performance monitoring system, thus, provides feedback
to the management process itself Findings of another case study done in Zimbabwe have shown that relatively sim-ple MIS generated reliable and useful information com-plemented by special survey data
The present study succeeded in using a package of strong MIS systems, performance review meetings having feed-back mechanism, in-service training, and ad-hoc rapid assessment surveys to improve the performance of the programme, particularly in the low-performing areas of Bangladesh
Table 3: Comparison of selected indicators of health and family-planning service use between the national and the cluster survey
%
MWRA who had ever
Data of BDHS 1996–1997 (Referent)
**Statistically significant difference found compared to the BDHS 1996–1997, after the withdrawal of the interventions at 95% confidence interval, p
< 0.05
CI = Confidence interval; FWA = Family Welfare Assistant;
H&FWC = Health and Family Welfare Centre; SC = Satellite Clinic;
Data source: BDHS = Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 1996–97
Table 2: Cluster survey results of selected indicators of health and family-planning service use in Sirajgonj after the withdrawal of the interventions
(n = 648) (n = 775)
MWRA who had ever
Results of 1995 (Referent)
**Statistically significant from 1 to 2 year(s) after the withdrawal of the interventions at 95% confidence interval, p < 0.05
CI = Confidence interval; FWA = Family Welfare Assistant;
H&FWC = Health and Family Welfare Centre; SC = Satellite Clinic
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the United States Agency for International
Devel-opment (USAID) under the Cooperative Agreement No
388-A-00-97-00032-00 ICDDR,B acknowledges with gratitude the commitment of the
USAID to the Centre's research efforts The authors gratefully
acknowl-edge the contributions to the paper: Dr Mizanur Rahman, Director, MIS,
NGO Service Delivery Programme, Bangladesh; Dr Ahmed Shafiqur
Rah-man, Senior Operations Researcher, Mr Jatindra Nath Sarker,
Dissemina-tion Manager; and Mr Subash Chandra Das, Senior Programmer, HSID,
ICDDR,B The authors express their thanks to members of the staff who
were involved in collection, editing, and processing of data Last but not the
least, special thanks go to Mr M Shamsul Islam Khan, Head, Publications
Unit, ICDDR,B, for his editorial help.
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Method-specific contraceptive prevalence rate, by year, in
Sirajgonj
Figure 1
Method-specific contraceptive prevalence rate, by year, in
Sirajgonj
3
26
19
15
11
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Traditional method